The recent growth literature has seen an explosion of work exploring the role of new and fundamental theories of growth such as geography, institutions, ethnic fractionalization, and religion. Nevertheless, claims about the empirical validity of these new growth theories are typically made...

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. While we find...

The recent growth literature has seen an explosion of work exploring the role of new and fundamental theories of growth such as geography, institutions, ethnic fractionalization, and religion. Nevertheless, claims about the empirical validity of these new growth theories are typically made...

Recent work in the growth literature has provided various explanations for transition delays and the great divergence. This paper provides empirical support for one theory of transition delays: initial land inequality. Our analysis is designed to elucidate the channels via which land inequality...

In this paper we uncover growth volatility regimes and identify their robust determinants using a large international panel of countries. In doing so we propose a novel empirical methodology that allows us to simultaneously deal with two key elements of model uncertainty, namely theory...